Privacy alert: Apple sharing your face with applications
APPLE has just started sharing your face with lots of apps.
Beyond a photo, the iPhone X’s front sensors scan 30,000 points to make a 3D model of your face. That’s how the iPhone X unlocks and makes animations that might have once required a Hollywood studio.
Now that a phone can scan your mug, what else might apps want to do with it? They could track your expressions to judge if you’re depressed. They could guess your gender, race and even sexuality. They might combine your face with other data to observe you in stores - or walking down the street.
Apps aren’t doing most of these things, yet. But is Apple doing enough to stop it? After I pressed executives this week, Apple made at least one change - retroactively requiring an app tapping into face data to publish a privacy policy.
“We take privacy and security very seriously,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said. “This commitment is reflected in the strong protections we have built around Face ID data - protecting it with the Secure Enclave in iPhone X - as well as many other technical safeguards we have built into iOS.”
Indeed, Apple - which makes most of its money from selling us hardware, not selling our data - may be our best defence against a coming explosion in facial recognition. But I also think Apple rushed into sharing face maps with app makers that may not share its commitment, and it isn’t being paranoid enough about the minefield it just entered.
“I think we should be quite worried,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The chances we are going to see mischief around facial data is pretty high - if not today, then soon - if not on Apple then on Android.”
The iPhone X lets other apps now tap into two eerie views from the so-called TrueDepth camera. There’s a wireframe representation of your face and a live read-out of 52 unique micromovements in your eyelids, mouth and other features. Apps can store that data on their own computers.
To see for yourself, use an iPhone X to download an app called MeasureKit. It exposes the face data Apple makes available. The app’s maker, Rinat Khanov, tells me he’s already planning to add a feature that lets you export a model of your face so you can 3D print a mini-me.
“Holy cow, why is this data available to any developer that just agrees to a bunch of contracts?” asked Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester Research. — Washington Post
Holy cow, why is this data available to any developer that just agrees to a bunch of contracts? – Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester Research